But why are we doing it? And is the influencer entrepreneur culture helping build our businesses or harm them? 

The age-old philosophical question asks: ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’.

The entrepreneurial equivalent has become:

‘If a founder is working on their business but doesn’t post about it on social media, does their business exist?’

Of course it does. But for some reason, us founders don’t quite believe it.

Perhaps the loneliness of being a founder turns us to social media for acknowledgement. Perhaps we’re drawn in by the validation that reassures us that we made the right decision to give up a stable income. Or perhaps it’s the quick dopamine fix we get that acts as a bandaid for our self-doubt.

Maybe it's that today’s successful entrepreneurs – from Elon Musk to Sarah Blakely – have millions of followers, so that becomes our benchmark (forgetting that their popularity is the effect of their business success, not the cause). 

Or perhaps it's because follower count is the closest we have to a universal and public metric that determines our impact on the world. 

Comparison and FOMO

At a time when mental health issues directly or indirectly impact 72% of entrepreneurs, social media is an unnecessary breeding ground for comparison. To give ourselves a fighting chance, surely it makes sense to avoid social media unless necessary?

That is easier said than done, so to help us combat the FOMO and internal pressures that we place on ourselves, we must unravel our ingrained beliefs about the role social media should play in the life of a founder. As entrepreneurs, we can claim we create content because it’s good for business, but the truth is more complex than that.

The opportunity cost

When you’re building a business, how you spend your time matters. You are responsible for everything from product and HR, to finance and sales. You’re spread thin, and you’ve got a lot to juggle. And everyone is relying on you to get this balance right.

It is easy to fall into the trap of working 80+ hours a week to do as much as possible. We equate doing more with better results, but this is a fallacy. As humans, we can’t work until we fall over. We’re just not as effective when we’re tired, understimulated and lonely. We make bad decisions – if we make them at all – when we’re overwhelmed and our brains are in chaos.

To stay healthy and perform at a high level, we have to make tough decisions about where we spend our time, as every decision is an opportunity cost.

Effective social influencing is incredibly time-consuming. It requires a continuous stream of content and conversation to craft a likeable, authentic persona. It has to be aspirational (staged) with the right level of vulnerability to draw people into your story. But public vulnerability when you have investors and staff that rely on you isn’t typically a smart move. It’s risky.

And what happens when the business needs you elsewhere. Will you choose Instagram content over cash flow planning? Nothing is more important than cash flow and financial forecasting; if you’re starved of cash, you can’t pay your staff. It’s game over, regardless of how many followers you have.

Different skills, different priorities

This might hurt, but the truth is you might not be good at influencing.

In fact, the odds are that you’re probably not very good at it. However, you have other skills, which have led to you taking a risk and launching your business. Being a founder is a full-time, challenging job. Likewise, being an influencer is a full-time, skilled job. But they are two different jobs with entirely different objectives and success metrics.

If you can spend 10 hours per week wearing your marketing hat, is becoming an ‘influencer entrepreneur’ the most effective way to do that? It might be. But be honest with yourself, because in many cases, it won’t.

If you’re cancelled' so is your business

Putting our lives online may open us up to compliments and admiration, but it also leaves us open to criticism. And female founders are particularly at risk of falling victim to the “build her up to tear her down” narrative that society likes to play out for women.

We’ve seen two specific examples of female founders rise to Instagram fame in the past few years; marketing decisions that ultimately undermined their businesses. Audrey Gelman’s The Wing closed after allegations of racism and hypocrisy, and Leandra Cohen’s Man Repeller came to a similar fate. Whilst the criticism of the brands may have been appropriate, would both companies have survived and evolved if they weren’t synonymous with their founders? I think so.

In today’s media, there are weekly headlines of celebrities and influencers being dropped from brand campaigns for unsavoury behaviour or mistakes made in public. Whatever you feel about cancel culture, businesses can quickly distance themselves from unpopular figures to limit brand damage. But you can’t oust a shunned founder or CEO as easily.

But it’s good PR

We know we need to market our businesses to get customers. And leaders need to have a public image that compliments the company brand.

But behind the scenes of the most successful companies that I’ve worked with – growing from around £10M revenue up to £100M – all of them have experienced PR companies tasked with thought leadership and profile building of senior executives.

The agencies ghostwrite articles, manage their social media profiles and build relationships with key media to secure interviews and features. These CEOs are not social media influencers.

So next time you’re comparing yourself to a seasoned entrepreneur on social media, remember that they are not spending hours coming up with content and engaging with comments; they have a team of experts. You may have a team at some point too, but for now, is filming reels the best use of your time? 

Resist the temptation

I have dabbled in the ‘influencer entrepreneur’ space for years. I run a marketing agency, so every day is centred around content, PR, media and advertising for clients. Because of this, I’ve convinced myself repeatedly that being active on social media as the face of our agency is crucial to our success  – but I’ve been lying to myself.

The best months we’ve had financially, and in terms of client performance, have been when I’ve been offline. 

As we continue to grow, we will inevitably expand our marketing and experiment with our own media channels. But these will not be centred on me. Instead, they will be collaborative and team-led. 

The influencer entrepreneur culture will not bring my agency success. At this stage, the most impactful thing we are doing is working hard behind the scenes to get great client results and word of mouth recommendations. It might not sound glamorous, but that’s where the magic happens. Because doing the work is more effective than performing it